A companion piece of sorts to yesterday’s post about misleading jackets: First-time novelist Sonya Chung wrote about the delicate process of cover design, especially in a case when “conveying the cultural elements of the novel in a jacket image could be tricky.”

Chung’s novel features a protagonist who’s “an American of Korean descent.” The woman featured on the cover is Korean, but she’s seen from behind, and about half the people to whom Chung sent the cover identified her as white (”one person even used the word ‘WASPy’”). This left the author with some thinking to do…